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Averna Receives Frost & Sullivan’s 2006 Excellence in Technology of the Year Award for its Advanced Surface Inspection Solution

PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Montreal, May 12th, 2006 –Averna, partnering with manufacturers to automate quality control & enhance productivity by leveraging their expertise in test, measurement & automation as well as the first class vision and robotics applications they deliver, is proud to announce it was awarded Frost & Sullivan’s 2006 Excellence in Technology of the Year Award for its advanced surface inspection solution.

Each year, Frost & Sullivan bestows this prestigious Award upon companies that have demonstrated excellence in technological innovation. This Award not only highlights Averna’s overall technological expertise and excellence but its leadership in the industry in terms of adoption, change, and competitive advantage.

 “Averna’s sophisticated vision inspection solution was developed to detect and classify surface defects at very low tolerance levels thus optimizing manufacturing processes and providing our clients with greatly increased levels of productivity and quality. This robust solution is capable of closely monitoring a wide range of surface defects including imperfections, color discrepancies and many more which can appear on metal surfaces such as turbine blades and bearings during the production process,” explains Averna’s Vice President of Vision & Robotics Charles Magnan who accepted this Award in front of the industry’s top contributors at the 2006 Excellence in Industrial Technologies Awards Banquet in Orlando, FL on April 26th.

“We selected Averna for its outstanding efforts in advancing industrial machine vision technology, particularly for metal surface inspection, and its integration with relevant hardware. Through its deployment of such state-of-the-art technology, Averna has showcased its impressive competencies in mechanical design, project management, and machine vision research & technology development,” supports Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Vishnu Sivadevan.

The high quality precision tools used to execute these inspection tasks offer the ability to classify as many as twenty different types of intricate defects. Using advanced 3D acquisition technology and a combination of CMOS and line scan cameras allowed Averna to develop this unique solution improving production line processes and significantly enhancing levels of defect detection mainly for blade profiling, deburring, part identification and verification.

About Averna

Averna is a privately-held Canadian corporation founded in 1999. The company focuses on manufacturing productivity improvements through information and automation systems that combine proven technologies from partners such as National Instruments, a world class leader in test measurement instrumentation, with today's business management best practices. Averna has delivered solutions for several companies such as Honeywell, General Electric, Alouette, Timken, Alcan, Philips, Alstom, Bombardier, CN, CAE, Canadian Space Agency and Harris. For more information about Averna, please visit their web site at www.averna.com.

About Frost & Sullivan
Frost & Sullivan, a global growth consulting company, has been partnering with clients to support the development of innovative strategies for more than 40 years. The company's industry expertise integrates growth consulting, growth partnership services, and corporate management training to identify and develop opportunities. Frost & Sullivan serves an extensive clientele that includes Global 1000 companies, emerging companies, and the investment community by providing comprehensive industry coverage that reflects a unique global perspective and combines ongoing analysis of markets, technologies, econometrics, and demographics. For more information, visit www.

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